Building a new shop stewards' movement

Linking the industrial to the political

AT THE recent RMT rail union discussion conference on the crisis of
working-class political representation, RMT general secretary Bob Crow
argued for the building of "a cross-industry national shop stewards'
movement".

But, as Bill Mullins explains, the call for a new 200,000-strong shop
stewards' movement to be built in Britain is a worthy aim in itself but
it does not answer the pressing need for a new mass workers' party.

BOB CROW'S call for a national shop stewards' movement seemed to many
at the conference to indicate this was his priority for the period
ahead.

There is no doubt that there is a crying need for active trade
unionists and shop stewards in every workplace. But to realise that goal
we need to look back at how the shop stewards' organisations were built
in the past, particularly the high point of the stewards' movement in
the 1960s and 70s, rather than believe we can conjure up such a movement
now.

Without a clear perspective about the need for shop stewards to have
their own political voice is to condemn a new generation to fight with
one hand tied behind their backs.

Every day, workers feel the brutal attacks on their conditions and
standards of living and want to do something about it. In the average
workplace, bosses brutally strive to get the most they can out of their
workers whilst paying them the least possible. This is a major
contributor to the huge rise in workplace stress today.

Millions of workers would, given the chance, join a trade union. No
doubt the new layer of shop stewards that Bob Crow hopes for would come
from their ranks. But this will not happen automatically. Indeed the
fastest-growing unions, PCS and RMT, with the biggest increase in shop
stewards have socialists playing the leading role. The role of workers'
leaders at all levels but particularly at national level, is crucial.

If these leaders remain silent on how a new party could be built, or
counter-pose the idea of the need for a new shop stewards' movement, as
Bob Crow does, this could encourage the idea that militant trade
unionism is enough.

Different situation

THE SITUATION in the 1970s was very different. There were 13 million
workers in unions, compared to 6.7 million today. And there were 29
million days lost in strikes in 1979, for example, compared to less than
one million last year.

The reasons for falling union membership and the corresponding
decline in mass collective strike action have been explained many times
in Socialist Party publications. They are a combination of
de-industrialisation of much of the British economy and the existence of
draconian anti-union laws, which trade union leaders have refused to
challenge.

Also, the collapse of the planned economies in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe ideologically demoralised or disoriented many trade union
activists. Lastly, throughout the 1990s, right-wing trade union leaders
clamped down on strikes and entered into partnership agreements and
single-union, no-strike deals with the bosses.

Yet, even in the 1970s, the development of the shop stewards'
movements and industrial struggle was not in a straight line. The slow
building up of working-class confidence in the workplaces over a whole
period led to these developments.

The growing confidence of workers to take strike action was a direct
result of full employment and a gradual increase in living standards.
This flowed from the massive development of the British economy in the
post-war years, which healed the scars of the inter-war period, of mass
unemployment and industrial defeats.

By the 1960s, the capitalist class had become increasingly alarmed by
the growth of unofficial strikes and industrial action led by shop
stewards in industries like docks, car manufacturing and engineering.

In the 1970s the Labour government commissioned an investigation into
the power of the shop stewards' movement and the unions as a whole.

The Bullock Report revealed the widespread strength of trade union
organisation on the shopfloor. Its leading layers were the shop
stewards. Bullock revealed there were something like 350,000 shop
stewards in the workplaces.

Then, workplaces mainly meant factories. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, service-sector and public-sector workers were only just beginning
to get organised in trade unions.

NUPE for example (which later became part of UNISON) had about 60,000
members in 1970. By the end of the decade its membership had grown to
600,000.

Organisation

IT WOULD be wrong to visualise the shop stewards' movement as a fully
coherent national force. But in certain industries and companies the
movement became better organised than others.

In the car industry, for example, because of the intense nature of
production line assembly work, strikes against the bosses were frequent
and in the words of one report: "99% of them were unofficial" - not
sanctioned by the official unions but organised by the shop stewards
from below.

And there wasn't one level of political understanding amongst the
shop stewards. The very fact of becoming involved in union activity led
to many stewards drawing political conclusions.

During the 1960s, for example, the Communist Party had a certain
level of support amongst shop stewards and played a key role in
mobilising the shop stewards' movement in the engineering industry, car
industry, docks and certain areas of the mining industry.

In the mining industry, there had been 20 years or more of gradual
decline. It was the reaction against Ted Heath's Tory government that
propelled Left leaders like Arthur Scargill into prominence during the
miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974.

The Communist Party mainly developed its influence through the
Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions. (LCDTU).

In the late 1960s, the LCDTU organised action against the Wilson
Labour government's attempts to introduce anti-trade union laws.

At that time, the Labour Party as a whole opposed Wilson's anti-union
ideas. Eventually, the combined pressure of the unions and the Labour
Party led to Wilson's own cabinet revolting against this first attempt
to bind the unions with new laws.

The LCDTU continued to mobilise the shop stewards' movement against
the Heath government when he came to power in 1970 and tried to
introduce anti-union laws through the Industrial Relations Act.

And the LCDTU, through a network of CP shop stewards, organised an
unofficial national one-day strike in October 1970 against the
Industrial Relations Act. Over 250,000 workers downed tools.

Political and industrial

THROUGH THE struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, the link between the
political and the industrial struggle was clear. This reflected the
material base of workers' struggles at that time and the existence of
large well-organised factories.

Today, neither the large-scale factories or that level of trade union
organisation exists to the same extent - though there is a relatively
high level of trade union organisation in the public sector.

Workers can be propelled to become activists and shop stewards by a
rapacious capitalist class driving workers into defensive struggles. But
to continually motivate these same activists requires the need to change
society along socialist lines to be raised.

To rebuild anything like a mass shop stewards' movement nowadays
requires the best workers' leaders to argue and campaign for the
building of a mass political alternative to New Labour. The big unions'
links to the Labour Party today are an impediment to conducting an
effective struggle for their members.

A new mass party of the working class would attract the best of the
new generation of trade union activists and a new layer of workers. This
would feed into the creation of a mass shop stewards' movement. In the
current political situation one task has to go hand in hand with the
other. To pretend otherwise is, unfortunately, to throw sand into the
eyes of today's trade union activists.